THEY don’t seem to have been around that long but The Cribs celebrate their tenth anniversary this year and, unlike a lot of bands of that vintage, their career remains on an upward curve.

Current album In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull followed Ignore The Ignorant (the 2009 collection recorded during Johnny Marr’s three-year stint as a band member) into the top ten and underlined that the Jarman boys, twins Gary and Ryan and younger brother Ross, are maturing as song writers and performers.

They have just unveiled an eye-catching video for one of the 14 tracks, Anna, compiled by fellow son of Wakefield Martin Creed who, as well as being a Turner Award-winning artist, is a musician whose band supported the Cribs on tour last year. And they hit the road again this autumn for a trek that takes in Leicester’s 02 Academy (0844 477 2000) on Thursday, November 1, Leamington’s Assembly (0844 854 1358) on Monday 5 and Birmingham’s HMV Institute (0844 248 5037) on Tuesday 6.

Far from proving problematical, the band reckon that Marr’s departure and Gary’s relocation to Oregon have helped them find a new lease of creative life.

“On the last record a lot of the ‘prettier’ sounds we created got attributed to Johnny having joined the band but it really wasn’t as clear cut as that,” said Gary. “We’d already started progressing in that direction – I was certainly trying to make my writing more expansive and I wanted to continue that with this record.”

Ryan agreed: “Gary knows I’m always pushing to do raw punk rock and so as a result he takes care of the gentler stuff, and I give him free rein so we have a good balance on the record.

“Because Gary had to come from the US, or we had to go there, we would have these two week blocks of time to work in, so they were pretty intense sessions.

“We played all day, seven days a week, it didn’t feel like work, it felt right.”

“It was the best time,” added Gary, “just hanging out and messing around with different pieces of gear, spending all day making noises, chasing tangents just like when we first started.

“We just started to write fragments of songs. We didn’t know what we were going to use them for but we built a sketch book with our ideas which were coming thick and fast.

“That was just the right start, really, re-connecting in the way we used to do things, in these little bolt-holes away from everything else that we had going on at the time.”